EMOTION FIELD #1

EMOTION FIELD #1 – The Odd Couple (German)
3 channel installation (synchronized) for 16 TVs, 2007, 7’15” (loop)

Synopsis:

Such is the ubiquitous spread of film and television that it is almost impossible now for anyone to view moving images and divorce themselves from the experience of popular television and cinema. Satirising some of the more prurient, psychological or power relationships characterised by an excessive exploitation of the conventions of television and film, in this installation, Melhus is himself absent.

EMOTION FIELD #1 is the first of a series that is based on recorded (auditive) non-verbal expressions of emotions appropriated from the soundtracks of Hollywood movies that have been dubbed for foreign consumption. In a darkened room, circles of monitors that are turned on their backs emit rhythmical flashes of colour and light to a soundtrack of extracts from the movie The Odd Couple. However, this extracts are peculiar. It is that of those sounds conveyed by the voice yet just between the words – stripped of its verbal or musical components, only the sound of non-verbal emotions has been kept.These breaths, grunts, and gasps that take place between some men and some women present an ambiguous interaction, undefined as either ominous or auspicious.

Translated into a play of coloured light, these sounds express the key ingredients of EMOTION FIELD #1: comedy, daily life and human emotions in an abstract form.

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